Chapter 8 Summary

More than two million people died at Kolyma, a prison camp in the Russian Far East. About one hundred of the original inhabitants of the region, the Eveni, still live in Godlya. During collectivism, the indigenous peoples were rounded up and sent to live in villages. In an effort to raise good Soviet Evenis, the state sent the children to boarding schools where they were stripped of their culture and forbidden to speak in their native tongues. Now, most of the townspeople are just perpetually drunk. One of the few sober men in town says they have nothing left. They are finished.

Thousands of miles away from Godlya, Dmitri Likhachev, an 84-year-old scholar of Russian medieval history, remembers his five-year sentence at a labor camp. As a student, Likhachev wrote a humorous essay on why the Soviets should reintroduce the letter "yat" to...